Islam Critiqued needs names; hanifs in the time of Muhammad?

In answer to the video "Abraham and the Kaaba: From Borrowed Stories to Sacred Scripture"

Pre-Islamic oral tradition has preserved names of the non-polytheistic remnants in their midst, some of them already mentionned above. The Quran cites some of them, Luqman, as an example of wisdom, righteousness and gratefulness to the One God 31:12-13. This pure way of the hanif, the hanifiyya, Abraham's way, was something that none could contend with, whether Jew, Christian and even the Arab polytheists who knew him, his history and never denied that his "Way" was the Right Way.

None denied he founded the Kaaba which he dedicated to Allah alone. That is why the pagans would simply argue that their idols did not supplant Allah, rather were merely intercessors 43:9,87,29:63,10:31,17:67,31:25. The complacency they felt as time went on made them believe that had they been doing anything wrong in their worship of Allah, then Allah himself would have already chastised them for it 16:35,6:148. The Quran therefore would repeat Abraham's life story while laying great stress on his antagonism to polytheism, as well as him not being part of any later group that claimed spiritual closeness to him, like the Jews and Christians. This was an admonishment, on one hand to the Arabs and the Quraish in particular. They regarded themselves as his spiritual and physical descendants. The people of the book and more particularily the Jews, thought the same and are told that Abraham instead was a pure submitter (lit. hanif muslim) as demonstrated throughout his upright life and unconditional submission to God

3:67"Ibrahim was not a Jew nor a Christian but he was a hanif, a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists".

In such background, the Quran would interpel Ismail's descendants and kept asking them to bring proof for their innovations 35:40-1, kept reminding them again and again about the One, supreme, all powerful Creator they readily professed belief in, yet placed interceding idols next to Him.

In the pre-Islamic poems of the likes of Jiran al-'Awd or Umayyah ibn Abi as-Salt, the hanifiya, "the way of Ibrahim" as he said, is mentioned by name and Ibn Ishaq quotes it in connection with the Yemenite ruler Abraha's attack on the Kaaba. Sirmah ibn Anas of the Banu Adyy ibn Al Najjar was another hanif, per the work of Isabah, that renounced idolatry and became a hanif and that he worshipped only the God of Abraham. There are countless sources that connect Abraham with the Arabs and those that desired to return to his ways, without any connection to Jewish and Christians ways, were considered hanifs. None among the Arabs ever contended with such facts.

This whole tradition revolved especially around the legacy of the Kaaba. The ARAB (although later transmitted by Muslims) tradition on this point is so strong and of such old standing that the Quran every now and then refers to it as a matter of undoubted history, and the Arabs never contended with it. There isnt any trace of the Arabs tracing their genealogy to anyone else than Ismail. Islam didn't show up and made them believe this massive conspiracy by first causing a general blackout. The onus is on the revisionists and critics of Islam to establish that what the Arabs believe is their identity is not true or that they identified themselves as anything else than Ishmaelites prior to Islam. There is a peculiar feature of those Ishmaelites of the Hijaz in that one finds rare occasions of them testifying to their ancestry. Instead it is the non-Muslim writers of the early days of Islam that emphatically do so. This is because these Ishmaelites, contrary to most people of the region and beyond, lived in insularity, rarely in conflict with their neighbors. They did not need to affirm their identity and territorial borders, nor boast of the greatness of their armies and battles they would have fought against invaders. The objections and calumnies of Islam's enemies among the Arabs -whether aimed at the the prophet's personality or his message- are reported and can be seen by anyone today, both in and out of the Quran. No eyebrow was raised as regards the Abrahmic connection to the Kaaba, yet it was the focal point and core of Muhammad's prophetic message. The same is the case concerning the monotheistic origin of some of their most highly revered rituals, although at the time stained with idolatrous practices. It is also interesting noting that although Abraham is clearly pictured as having been to and prayed at the Kaaba where he had settled a place of monotheistic worship together with his son, yet this is never done in a polemical tone against the b‪elievers of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is thus inevitable that traditions about Abraham relating him to Mecca and its sanctuary were current in the peninsula well before the rise of Islam. 

As appropriately noted by Goudarzi 

"It is well known that Ishmael did not occupy a prized position in late-antique Jewish or Christian thought. For Jews, he was an outcast, excluded from Abraham’s household and inheritance, a man of the desert who was worthy neither of the land nor of the law that was given to Isaac’s descendants. For Christians, Ishmael was above all the son of Abraham “according to the flesh” but not the spirit, the son of the slave woman who inherited the servile state of his mother, and therefore a type for the spiritually incapacitated Jews toiling under the burden of the law. Jewish and Christian writers depicted Ishmael as a foil for their beloved Isaac, a potential rival who resorted to violence and persecution, a man guilty of idolatry and sexual misconduct— whose menacing ambitions were nipped in the bud thanks to Sarah’s timely intervention".  

All these perverted and corrupt ideas were well established in the historical background of pre-islamic Arabia. The prophet Muhammad, or any Arab prior to Islam, had nothing to win in terms of credibility or eminence in the eyes of Jews and Christians by supposedly inventing family ties to Ishmael. Even the covenant of the land, as stated in the Torah, is open to any non-Israelite convert. Also, nowhere does the HB restrict the covenant of prophethood to the descendants of Abraham, be it Israelites or Ishmaelites. The notion of the Arabs or the prophet resorting to a radical re-shaping of their ancestry to gain any kind of legitimacy in relation to the people of previous scriptures is therefore not only improbable given the scale of the conspiracy but mainly useless and even counter-productive.

The question one should be asking one's self is how could Muhammad actually pass off the Kaaba as being built by Ibrahim, if the Arabs did not already believe it considering that Arab tribes had since antiquity been paying extensive homage to the Kaaba and its rites? It is the height of absurdity to say that in any culture, one would manage to fake not only his own identity but also that of an entire nation without anyone raising an eyebrow. This is worth emphasizing; for nothing was more obnoxious to an Arab than to ascribe a false or imaginary ancestry to him.   Arab culture had such pride in its ancestral origins that when the Quran wanted to give a point of reference to how intensely Allah should be praised, it evoked the remembrance of their forefathers which Allah's remembrance must surpass 2:200. Despite the effects of modernism and the loss of oral culture, some Arabs even today still keep their ancient family trees that date to the time of Prophet. The Quraysh, the prophet's own tribe, was respected among the Arabs not only because it ruled over Mecca but also because of the nobility of its lineage. To come and argue that the prophet fabricated it is very unrealistic.

Even if we disregard these facts and suggest that the Arabs had a memory lapse, why would a people who had forgotten their common ancestor, accept the ancestor of another people as their ancestor too because the latter stated so, thus not only puting in question their identity but also compromising their claim on their prime religious site and by extension the economical benefits of being its custodians? Such an illegitimate attack on a people's known identity and its ancestral worship sites would have met with universal resistance, both from the preexisting idolatrous population of Mecca as well as from the Arab tribes.

Critics of Islam ignore these simple observations, forget that the starting point of studies on the Arabs concerning their origin, culture and religious identity should start from their own sources. This is a well-recognized modus operandi in ethno-historical studies of a group of people.